"Ferryboat Bill + Sweet Sister Ray" - Mirrors, Cleveland, Ohio, November 14, 1973
A farewell to Jamie Klimek — a Doom & Gloom hero if ever there was one. After all, if Klimek hadn't lugged his tape machine to the La Cave club several times in the late 1960s, we wouldn't have several of the more mysterious and bewitching and awesome Velvet Underground artifacts — "Sweet Sister Ray," Live '68 and beyond. These are the kinds of things that, if recordings didn't exist, would've been just been barely remembered rumors, wisps lost to time. If some aging freak told you about that one night in Cleveland when the Velvets played a beautiful half-hour drone with Lou Reed intoning improvised lyrics about electro-shock therapy ... well, you wouldn't believe it. But you can believe it, thanks to Jamie Klimek.
Klimek, of course, thoroughly and thankfully shook by what he saw and heard at La Cave, went on to form some of the best VU-damaged bands of the time — Mirrors, The Styrenes, Electric Eels, etc. So here's Klimek leading Mirrors through a tune he knew as well (or better!) than the Velvets themselves: "Sweet Sister Ray." And it's presaged by a visit from "Ferryboat Bill"! That's interesting, since that tune doesn't appear on any of the Klimek tapes and I don't think it had emerged on bootleg by this point ... either they're playing it by memory or, somewhere, Jamie had a tape! (An early Peter Laughner band also covered "Bill" ... hmmmm!).
